Getting guns to defend your stash of illegal drugs does not qualify as 'self defense,' judge rules

A federal judge today tossed a man's request to quash a charge of using a gun in furtherance of a drug crime on Second Amendment grounds, concluding that even the most recent Supreme Court gun decisions still only allow gun ownership for "law abiding" reasons and that using guns to stave off other drug dealers doesn't count.

The ruling comes in the case of a guy facing federal charges for the cocaine, crack and handguns, one with an obliterated serial number, federal agents say they found in an apartment in 2021 he and a co-defendant allegedly used in Mansfield as a drug stash house.

In a motion to US District Court Judge Nathaniel Gorton, Malik Parson's lawyer argued recent Supreme Court decisions spelling out the right of Americans to pack weaponry made the charge of possession of a firearm in furtherance of drug trafficking activity unconstitutional, because Parson had the two guns "for self defense to avoid a drug robbery."

Nice try, but nope, Gorton answered today. Gorton wrote that the 2008 Heller decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled the Second Amendment gave individuals the right to have guns at home "for a lawful purpose." True, that means self defense, but:

It follows that for the government to prove that Parsons violated § 924(c) [the law related to use of guns as part of a drug crime], it must demonstrate that he possessed a firearm to promote illicit activity. He claims that the charged conduct encompasses self-defense against robbery but allegations that a firearm was possessed for the indisputably unlawful purpose of defending a stash of narcotics and ill-gotten proceeds vitiates any constitutionally cognizable assertion of "self-defense."

That brought Gorton to the 2022 Bruen decision, which extended the Second Amendment self-protection right to include wandering around in public with a gun - but which also notes that decisions dating back to the 17th century in England, allow the prohibition of "carrying arms to the terror of the public with ill intent." And that, Gorton continued, means:

Employing firearms, even defensively, to further a criminal drug conspiracy fits within that tradition of proscribing the ill-intended use of arms.

He concluded:

It strains credulity to assert that the Framers sought to protect the bearing of arms for the purposes of promoting criminal conduct, even if the arms in question are deployed defensively. The motion will be denied.